PAX Music

So I didn't get to see Metroid Metal live at PAX because I was volunteering in another part of the con. I heard they killed everyone and then brought them back to life with nothing but sonic manipulation. Oh well. I did get to stop by their booth and pick up their album, Varia Suite though. I asked the guy at the table if he was in the band. He told me no, he was their producer or something. Poor guy must have been asked that constantly. The sucky part was that I didn't bring anything capable of playing CDs with me and neither did any of my friends. So I had to wait until I got home to listen to it. I have since listened to it about 10 times. This is significant because I don't usually listen to something twice in such short a span of time. With MM I can't help it. It gets stuck in my head (it is game music after all) and I must play the album in order to exorcise the daemons. So far my favorite song is "Item Room". I wasn't expecting that to be very cool, but they do this odd time signature thing with a staccato riff that hits to the core. THE MOTHER EFFIN CORE BABY!!! ::clears throat:: So if you like game music and/or instrumental mental then please give these guys a try. MetroidMetal.com


On a much less game-related aside, I ran into a guy standing outside the entrance to the convention center. He asked me if I had heard of Sir Mix-a-lot. I replied in the affirmative. He explained that just like Sir Mix-a-lot he was a rap artist from Seattle trying to make it big. He handed me his latest album and said they were giving them out in exchange for "donations", whatever I felt like I could give. Now I'm not really a fan of rap music. I have a select few groups that I like to listen to and it's mostly white-people-friendly rap like the Roots. But I do have a soft spot for a: sales people (having been in sales myself) and b: people trying to make it (also being in that position myself). I told him I'd give him 2 dollars. He said "OK but we are asking for 5". I gave him 2.
So I gave it a listen when I got home. Again I'm not a big rap person. I mostly find it hard to relate to the subject matter. I didn't grow up in "the hood", I never shot nobody, I'm not gangsta. I find that most rap is just the rapper telling everyone how much better at rapping he is than everyone else. It's this kind of circular self awareness that just seams sort of masturbatory. I feel like I'm watching clothes in a dryer. Anyway I'm getting off track. The album was pretty good. Like I said, I had a hard time with the lyrics but in the words of American Bandstand it had a beat and I could dance to it. The words are delivered in a rapid fire style that I found pleasing to the ear. I can see this guy getting pretty big in the next few years. The production quality was high and they seem to have a sense for the single.
Oh yeah, I never said who I was talking about! The guys name is Juga Hill and the album is called One Way (Pre-Album Chapter 3). I'm guessing there are Chapters 1 and 2 out there somewhere. JugaHill.com will take you to his myspace page which has a good selection of his work.

PAX09 For Realz This Time

Oh all right all right! Fine. I'll write a proper post.

Lets talk about games shall we? I only played one hands-on demo: Darksiders. It was pretty fun I guess. I walked away feeling like I had just played a next-gen God of War. You run around beating people with a sword and climbing things. The coolest part is that you can pick things up like people or cars. Grabbing enemies buy the neck and insta-killing them was pretty fun. So you're supposed to have a horse in the game but that wasn't in the demo. So... yeah, God of War.

Best demo I watched someone else play: Bayonetta. This one's been on my radar for about as long as Darksiders has. It's another third-person action hack-and-slash staring a... um, yeah the plot escapes me... she's a gun... witch? Whatever, she runs around killing stuff. The first guy I watched play the game was pretty good at it. I watched him take down two bosses. I think they were bosses; they were pretty epic. As she fought these huge monster things they destroyed the environment in ways that completely changed the battlefield. There were at least four "oh snap" moments in the 3 min of gameplay I witnessed. The shifting environment during the boss battles were half of them. The finishing moves used to kill the bosses were the other. Apparently the player's character has the ability to use her hair and clothes to turn giant beasties into piles of goo, and in a ludicrously spectacular manner. I'm not going to go into detail because you really have to just see it, but wow. Wow.

Also impressive was Brink. They had a big screen set up and a guy with an English accent was giving live demos every hour or so. The game takes place on this floating island and you play as a soldier from one of two opposing factions. Your goal is to complete missions, but the twist is that the missions are generated by the AI. Your character class can be switched around during the battle and your missions are assigned to you based on the class you are playing. You can choose which mission you want to do from a pop-up menu, so you're not stuck having to do one thing. I think this is especially cool because I hate getting stuck on one mission! To me this approach could streamline and maximize the fun factor. There is an RPG element with your character as well. It wasn't made clear to me exactly what you would be improving stat-wise, but he did go over a pretty robust visual customization system. As your character progresses he (or she?) will have access to more armor and regalia. Also cool is this action button they built in where your character can intuitively move around the environment, traversing obstacles, and just not getting stuck on stuff. It looks pretty slick in action, and I can imagine it will be pretty important because the environments I saw were tangled, jungle-like mazes of metal and debris.

So PAX was sweet. There were a lot of great games there but Bayonetta and Brink were the two that really caught my eye.

PAX09

So I went to PAX and had a great time. The end.

Seattle Bound

So this week I'm traveling to Seattle for the 2009 Penny Arcade Expo. This will be my first time in the state of Washington and my first "con". I know it's an "expo" but con is pretty accurate. Nerd con to be exact. I don't know if there is a more general purpose meeting place for all things nerd. The primary theme is video games of course, but just like the comic for which it is named PAX is about more than that. It's about our culture (nerd culture). I mean it grew out of a COMIC so there is another nerd cornerstone right there.

Anyway I'm going and it's going to be fun. I had hoped to bring a working demo of a game to show people but laziness prevailed and I haven't gotten much done on it. I'll will be working as an Enforcer, the volunteer army that runs the show. I'm hoping it will help me make some new friends and gain some industry contacts.

Speaking of PAX I've heard some new music recently. Penny Arcade shared this link in their latest post: http://2playerproductions.bandcamp.com/ It's an album from the 2008 Blip Festival which is all about using unconventional hardware to make music. Hardware like the Gameboy. There are 32 songs and I listened to about 10 or so. It's worth a look. Also search for "Gameboy music" on YouTube to see some neat-o videos about the making of such things. So then later I was checking out Nuklearpower.com and he had a link to these guys: http://metroidmetal.bandcamp.com/album/varia-suite. Checking out THEIR site I saw that low and behold they would be playing at PAX! This is cool because as I discovered from listening to those three tracks, these guys rock my ASS!! I'm thinking of ordering the album because like Austin Powers, that sort of thing really IS my bag baby.

Murder Simulator

So I've had time to log some hours on Fallout 3. I'm not going to speak about it from a review standpoint. It's enough to say that the game is more than sufficiently awesome. It is totally worth buying and playing. The only complaint I can think of is the jumping seems a little glitchy. But jumping really isn't an integral part of the game to the point where you could probably get through it without ever hitting the Y button. I guess I could also say that item collecting has become annoyingly repetitious. To explain, there is a lot of junk lying around for you to pick up and either use or sell. However, you have a limit to how much you can carry. This limit can be increased by raising your strength but ultimately it's still a limit. So really this boils down to a decision: do you take the time to run back and forth between the site where all of the items are and home base or do you grab only what you need and press on? Of course if you pass up the extra swag you may find yourself short on something vital later on, and if you do take the time you may find yourself at the end of a game session not much further than when you started. All of this just seems to add to the realism though. So I guess I have to go with "no complaints".

The cool thing about the game is what it lets you do. The Fallout series has always been great about giving you a lot of options in a world with plenty to do. Number 3 takes it to a whole new level. I could go on and on about all the nifty little things you can do, but instead I'm going to talk about killin'. Fallout is not a game about killing people. It certainly has a lot of features designed around killing and you can't really avoid it but that's not what the game is about. "Murder simulator" is a term I recently heard (read) used to describe Prototype, an action game that recently came out. From what I've seen, Prototype is about killing stuff, it's at the center of everything you do. In Fallout it's simply a means to an end. However, if your end happens to be killing people then you are in luck. The game can be converted from RPG to "murder simulator" with disturbing celerity.

I had been playing about 10 hours when I came upon a little house in a burned out neighborhood. Up until this point I had been playing "seriously", staying focused on the objectives and not really messing around. The house was the home of this woman who was living alone. I saw a knife sitting on the counter in the kitchen and thought, "I wounder if she'll get pissed if I pick it up?" She didn't do anything about it so I thought, "I wonder if she'll get pissed if I stab her to death with it?" Yeah, she didn't like that very much. Oh, she fought back of course but she was no match for my hit points and I just slashed away until she slumped to the floor dead. I searched her for loot and realized with surprise that if I stole her clothes it would leave her model lying in her underwear. A bit taken aback by this I did the only thing a decent person would... I stabed her a few more times. What happened? SHE KEPT ON BLEEDING! Even after being dead the models in this game continue to render damage and in gory detail. After a few more cuts her freaking arm came off!!!

Now I don't have a problem with this. In fact I think it's awesome. My question though is where is the public outcry over this game? Remember back when some guy made a big deal over the romantic elements of Mass Effect? I think he made up some bull shit about creating your own whore or something, and parents everywhere flipped their shit... and it wasn't even true! I have heard nothing about Fallout 3 being overly violent yet this is a game where you can murder someone, strip them to their underwear, and carve them up until they are nuggets! This is several steps beyond GTA. Has Jack Thomson seen this game? Am I just late to the party?

Anyway, great game. I look forward to logging a couple hundred hours on it and then playing through the game again as an "evil" person just so I can KILL EVERY BODY.

Update: Ultimate Sapphire Edition! pt 2.

Oh yeah, and Marvel vs Capcom 2 finally came out. And I bought it. And it's just as stupid hard as I remember it. Nothing makes you feel like you suck quite like getting beat on the first match on the "easy" setting. Really, calling it "easy" is just plain disingenuous.

Update: Ultimate Sapphire Edition!

Time for some updates! That title was supposed to be a play on the Pokemon naming scheme and not have anything to do with the actual post but I just realized that it does:

A couple weeks ago I finally bought that new video card I wanted. The Radeon HD4650 as manufactured by... Sapphire! How do you like that? Anyway it works great although I've had some problems getting it to work with one of my monitors. The other half of the story is that I finally played Unreal 3. It looks awesome, I'm able to run it on the highest settings just fine. That's about the best thing I can say about the game though. It looks great and beyond that it's pretty much the old Unreal with maybe a few tweaks. there is a single player story now, but I couldn't bring myself to care about it though. A game like that doesn't really need a story. Before each match you are looking at a map of the planet with icons that represent the different battle locations. This suggests some sort of strategic campaign but disappointingly there really isn't one. Occasionally you get to choose to do an extra mission but other than that the progression is completely linear. Still, it's fun to play and I'm looking forward to creating some maps for it.

I found a copy of the Castlevania Double Pack for GBA... and this time I actually bought it. The Double Pack is a reissue of the hard-to-find Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow. I justified the purchase buy telling myself I needed something for an upcoming trip I was taking. I responded by saying that I already have some GBA games I haven't spent enough time with. I responded to that by saying fuck you I'm buying it because I want it I don't need a good reason you jackass!

A few weeks later I used a remarkably similar justification (the "fuck you I want it" one) to buy Fallout 3. I may have mentioned that I tend to be about a year behind on new games. I don't like to drop $60 on a new release and I'm happy to play all the older (cheaper) games until the blockbusters come down in price. Speaking of Blockbuster, that's where I got it. Surprised? I was, when I saw it there for $40 used. I waited about a month before I actually picked it up, but once I saw that it was $15 cheaper there than it was at GameStop I was sold and it wouldn't be long until I found my way back there clutching a wad of bills.

That's it for now. I'll write up my impressions of Fallout 3 next time.